Marianne Jean-Baptiste first worked on a film with writer-director Mike Leigh nearly 30 years ago, when they made 1996’s Secrets & Lies. The movie, which centered on a woman going on a search for her birth parents, was a massive success, winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes and landing five Oscar nominations, including a best-supporting-actress nod for Jean-Baptiste.
one of the best performances of the year in this raw portrait of mental illness, which hit theaters this month.
Leigh is known for the unorthodox way he writes scripts, collaborating with his actors to create their characters and shape the story. As Jean-Baptiste told Little Gold Men’s Richard Lawson and Rebecca Ford when they sat down with her at the Denver Film Festival following a screening of the film, it was a grueling process that involved taking inspiration from a number of real-life people, as well as hours of rehearsal and improvisation.
Vanity Fair: When did Mr. Leigh come to you with this film, and what were those early conversations like?
Marianne Jean-Baptiste: Mr. Leigh came to me with this film probably in 2019. And when I say he came to me with this film, he didn’t actually come to me with that film. He contacted me and said, “Look, let’s do it again. Let’s do something. Don’t know what it’s going to be about. Don’t know what you’ll be in it. But we’re going to have fun.” Then COVID-19 happened and it was put on hold, and then it was put on more hold.
Can you walk us through how you developed the character together?
A lot of the work happens in isolation with Mike. So he would say, “For the first day of rehearsals, come in with a list of characters.” I had over 100 people on the list. And we whittle away at this list until it gets smaller and smaller. I ended up with about five people. And at that point, he says, “We’re going to merge those five people.”
So you do an exercise whereby you’re moving around, and at each point in the particular space that you’re in, that character has to become visible. It keeps going and going until you actually merge the characters. Then you sit down again, and you create a character from the first memory, to the age they’re gonna be when you see them in the film, with all the detail that comes into a life. It’s almost like creating a parallel universe. So I went out and I found what school she would go to. I found the house that she grew up in, worked out the distance from the house to the school, what bus she would have taken. I mean, it’s finite detail, but it’s all stuff that you can have an emotional, organic memory and recall for when you get into the improvisational section of the rehearsal period.
How does the improv experience work?
We have three and a half months of rehearsal, so what happens is, there’s a load of stuff that happens before that you don’t see. Some improvisations take five, six hours. And they’re just leading to, say, an argument, and so you start from that point. We’re establishing the running condition of the family. So everything that you don’t see up until that point, we’ve worked on it. We’ve worked on their morning routines. We’ve worked on who washes up the dishes, who doesn’t; who does the cleaning, who doesn’t. So by the time you get to that scene, all of the information from those improvisations is on hand for her.
Have any of the five people you based Pansy on seen the film?
I think a couple of them have, but what happens is, from those five people, we create a completely new character with different aspects of those five people’s lives. And then we give them pain, heartache, disappointment, success. So they become a different person. I mean, I’d be very shocked if anyone came to me and said, “You based that character on me.”
What do you find most difficult about this process, compared to a more traditional way of creating a character?
It’s difficult in the best possible way. It’s challenging. You’re using so much of your imagination. It’s very taxing, but it’s like a superpower in the end.
How did you approach whether you personally liked Pansy?
I personally think it’s very important to not judge the characters that you’re playing. You have to have compassion for them in order to play them with honesty. Pansy doesn’t think she’s a difficult person. She thinks everybody else is difficult.
We refer to them in the third person so that there’s always that separation. But I think all of the actors were able to, in the end, have sympathy for Pansy. Which was, I think, a win.
Were you able to let her go at the end of the day, or would you take her home with you?
I kept saying no, but then when I go and talk about it with my husband, he’s like, “Um, I think she came home.” I think at the end of the day, going home, enjoying cooking, enjoying cleaning, having a glass of wine was good. I’d watch it sometimes, and I’d go, I don’t even look like her. That’s not my body. What the hell? But those thoughts, they stayed—I’d be literally walking down the street going, Oh, shut up, Pansy.
How do you feel like you’ve changed as an actor since working on Secrets & Lies?
I kind of have come full circle. After working with Mike Leigh, I found it quite difficult to adjust to the conventional way of working. And by that, I mean a procedural TV show. You’d be playing an FBI agent, and the costume would be Gucci and Fendi and all that stuff, and you’d be like, But she can’t afford [that] on her salary! So you kind of have to give in to that. I get back to working with Mike, and all of a sudden it’s like, You’re asking me? It was petrifying, exciting, exhilarating. I just want to do more of it. I want to work more in that kind of way.
Did things really change for you after your Oscar nomination for Secrets & Lies?
In a sense, yes, because it opened up America and the industry, I suppose. But it was so kind of surreal and bizarre, because the Academy Awards for us in England at that time was just something that happened over there. I still think about it and go, Wow, that happened. It was kind of quite magical, actually. I think it was from the Golden Globes, because then after the Golden Globes, there was talk of the Academy Awards, and we were like, Wow. Our budget for Secrets & Lies, I think, was about $3.5 million. The diamonds that I wore for the Academy Awards were worth more than that.
Is there any type of role you’d like to tackle in the future?
I would really like to play, like, a Bond baddie, or just an evil genius. It’s something that you don’t see women play, roles like that, and if you do, they shift—something happens, and they become a lovely person in the end, or then they’re unwell and they’re on medication. I would just like to have the freedom to play somebody who is awful, really an evil genius, a criminal mastermind.
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